The Nitty Gritty of Launching Simply

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie. And today I want to give you a simple, no-frills, nitty-gritty of launching. This is a question that came from one of my email subscribers, and she asked, like, there are so many different ways to launch, whether it's a challenge or it's a webinar, or if it's a summit or if it's a PLF. And I just wanna know, like, what's the basic nitty-gritty of a launch? How many emails, how many posts, how long? And so I'm gonna go through this. With you now. First and foremost, when you're doing a launch, you wanna make sure that you have an audience. This is really important, and this is where most launches fall down, is that people think the launch itself creates the audience, and it, in most cases, it doesn't. You can definitely boost your audience through a launch mechanism like a webinar or a challenge, but audience building is something you should be thinking about all the time. And if I were to pick a method of building an audience today in 2024, I would actually pick the 3-part workshop series funnel. We actually taught this funnel in spring of 2023, and the idea is it's 3 workshops. They are free. There's no pitch. You are building great rapport in the market. It's one registration page and they opt in for all the workshops and usually they're every week and they're at the same time every week and they're on an umbrella topic where you can have 3 different trainings. The reason we like this is because first it's free. Second of all, it's a higher commitment lead magnet. If you haven't listened to my podcast on different types of lead magnets, definitely wanna go listen to that one. So it's a higher commitment lead magnet. It also will capture a lot of your potential audience because while it's one umbrella topic, you are targeting different like specifics of the topic. And so people are attracted to it because they opted in. And even if they don't watch all 3, at least the chances of them wanting one of them are high. And the last reason is that you can run ads for a longer period of time on this funnel. So it gives you more time to optimize. Right now, if you are listening to this podcast episode and it is January of 2024, If you go to attentioncatchers.com, you will see this is a workshop series funnel that we are running right now for Funnel Gorgeous. If it's after February, the site might be live, it might not be, I don't know, but that is an example of a workshop series funnel. So I am preloading this podcast with the call to action Are you building an audience? You should be building an audience even when you're not launching. All right, so let's go into the launch model and let's stick with the simplest, most efficient way to launch. Step 1, have an offer that is somewhere between $100 and let's say $3,000. Are there exceptions? Of course, but for the sake of argument, this model will work for anything in that price range. If you are selling something that is over $300, I would recommend that you have one pay plan option. Now you can have two, but I'm going to give you a caveat for that. But we're going to pick one pay plan option and we want that pay plan option to be juicy enough that it really makes a difference in the amount of money they have to part with when they sign up. Let me give you an example. If I'm selling something for $1,000 and I make it 3 payments of $400, I'm either going to have to give you $1,000 today or I'm going to have to give you $400 today. And that's still pretty expensive, right? I would consider that not a super effective pay plan. But what if the pay plan was 6 payments or 9 payments or whatever it works out to be of $197. Now I'm under $200 and there is a tipping point there. Like I know in a lot of families, if you're going to spend over $200, you know, you got to talk to your spouse about it, right? So it's just under that limit. Now it's like I'm either going to part with $1,000 or I'm going to part with $200. And that seems like a better pay plan. So I like to find that juicy pay plan that really makes it feel like, okay, I can do this today. So you're going to have an offer and you're going to come up with one pay plan. You are going to need a funnel. The most basic funnel is a 2-page funnel. It's a sales page and it's an order form. Technically it's 3 pages if you count the order confirmation page, which is the page that shows after they buy. That long-form sales page is going to need to be written well and designed well. And then when they click over to the order form, they're going to have the choice to pay it in full or choose the pay plan option. That's really all you need for a basic launch. If you are building an audience, like I said at the beginning of this podcast, when it comes time to actually do the launch, you're going to sell directly to that audience that you already built. In terms of Facebook ads for a basic launch, you can upload your audience list. So let's say you have 3,000 people in your audience. You can go ahead and upload that audience list to Facebook and Instagram and and every single post that you do during the launch, you can throw some ad money at it. And that will just ensure that it's more likely that your posts, your social media posts on Facebook and Instagram will be seen by the audience that are already following you. And then you can also tell Facebook and Instagram, please make sure to show these ads to this customer list. That should not cost you a whole lot of money. Again, all the legwork for building an audience happens before the launch. So even at $10 a day, you're going to get in front of a good chunk of the people that are following you and the people that are on that customer list. You do not have to make special ads for your launch. You can just use the posts that you're doing each day during the launch, and you can boost them with those ad dollars. Okay. So when it comes time for a launch, you need to pick a 5-day period. You can do shorter, you can do 3 days, you can do 7 days, you can do 14, but anything longer than that gets really gnarly for you. And here's why. During a launch, you have to be showing up every single day, and it's hard to show up every single day for 14 days with the same message. So the creativity power you need in a longer launch is not to be underestimated. This is why we love Monday to Friday launches or Thursday to Sunday launches. So most of the launches that happen in Funnel Gorgeous, the cart opens on Monday morning and it closes on a Friday night. You could also do a Thursday night to a Sunday night, but those are more often when you're doing some sort of live event webinar. So let's go with the Monday to Friday. The first thing that you need to think about are the 2 weeks before the launch. This is where you build all that anticipation, and if those Of you who just finished celebrating Christmas, you know that the anticipation of getting the gifts and then seeing the gifts wrapped are almost as good as the gifts themselves. If my kids woke up on Christmas morning and all they saw were a bunch of unwrapped toys under the tree, it wouldn't have the same impact. The pre-launch is the gift wrapping, and it is the anticipation of Santa coming down the chimney. What you do in the pre-launch is very important. So 2 weeks before opening day, you want to begin talking about your upcoming product launch, and I recommend about 6 emails. And these are not sales emails, and they are not like, "Hey, buy my thing," because there's nothing to buy yet. So you want to talk about maybe the story behind why you're going to launch. Maybe you're going to talk about asking for feedback about what they want to see in the program. Maybe you can talk about the 3 reasons that people will resist this product when it comes out, right? So you want to come up with like 6 topics that you can talk about, and you're going to write to your audience. Again, this is another reason why that audience needs to be there and waiting for when you do your pre-launch. I like to write the email, and then from the email in Funnel Gorgeous, what I do is I hand the email over to Kathy, and Kathy then reads the email and tries to come up with a cool way to post about it. So we could do stories, you can do Reels, you can do text posts, you can do carousels, but you're going to take that email and you're going to come up with a post. You do not have to run traffic or paid ads to these posts if you don't want to. You can put $5 or $10 behind it to give it a little bit of a boost. And those 2 weeks, every other day you're going to be writing and you are building anticipation. Now for some launches, it actually helps if you have a waitlist. That way when you're talking about it, you can say at the end of your email or your post, like, hey, go to yourdomain.com/waitlist to sign up for the waitlist. It's just a small little micro-commitment that your customer can make that shows that, hey, I'm raising my hand and I'm interested. Now, if you want to get fancy, you can give them a reason to sign up for the waitlist. Something like, hey, we're actually going to be giving out a free hoodie or a free discovery call or a free whatever. To the first 20 people who sign up, and only the people that are on the waitlist are gonna get the early bird email. So if you have some juicy first 20 type thing, you can send people to that waitlist and you can tell them, "Hey, you're gonna get an email a little bit, couple hours extra. It's gonna give you that sort of front of the line feeling, and then you're gonna get that bonus." So if you do that, you may want to actually open up the cart on a Sunday night, let's say, and email just the people on the waitlist and say, "Hey, the doors are open just for you guys. Go be one of the first 20," you will get a little push of sales on Sunday night. For the actual launch, you're going to email every single day: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then you're going to email twice on Friday, once in the morning and then once 3 hours before the cart closes. Each day of the launch, you want to think about one particular angle. Maybe it's a case study, maybe it's a frequently asked question, maybe it's an maybe it's a marketing argument, and then write those emails and turn those emails into posts. That's really it for a launch. Yes, there are a lot of things that you can do that are extra. Here's one example. We call it a plot twist, and it's the day before the cart closes. So in this case, it would be on a Thursday. You can reveal something that wasn't planned, something that's not on the sales page. So some people do like a surprise bonus and they say, hey, we've added this bonus. If you've already bought, congratulations, you've got a free gift. If you haven't bought, here's the last carrot we're dangling in front of you. Or you could roll out an extended pay plan, something like, hey, you know, we had a few people asking and they really need an extended pay plan, so we went ahead and rolled out a 12-pay of $97, driving that price even lower. So you can add a plot twist. You can add a webinar if you want. You could do a webinar on Sunday night, but that really does shift the type of launch it is. And I'm not going to get into that for the sake of this. I want to try to keep this as simple as possible. So hopefully that helps for those of you who feel overwhelmed by launching. That is the general idea. You want to pay special attention to anyone who is replying to your emails, commenting on your posts, or asking you any questions because those are hot leads. Those are people that are raising their hand and saying yes, they're interested. A lot of people don't realize that in a launch, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday usually are the hardest days. They are the days with the least amount of sales. If you're doing an early bird, Sunday night will get you a lot of sales. If not, Monday is going to be a decent sales day. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, things are going to drop off. And in fact, by Wednesday, you're going to say you hate launching, and that's really normal. And then on Friday, sales should pick up a little bit again. And with that last 3-hour email, you will get a rush of sales. In general, you can do the same amount of sales on the Friday that you do on the Monday. So if you got 10 sales on Monday and then you get 2 sales on Tuesday and then you get 1 sale on Wednesday, and then you get zero sales on Thursday, that's actually very normal. You probably will get another 10 sales on Friday because humans react to urgency. And so if someone comes to me on a Wednesday and they say, I've had 12 sales, I'm going to say to them, how many sales did you have on Monday? They're going to say 10. And I'm going to say, okay, you can expect about 22 sales. So that's sort of numbers-wise. You can expect 3 to 5% of people who land on the sales page to purchase your offer. I hope this was helpful. I hope this sort of demystified launching. And please don't forget the beginning where I said that audience building is incredibly important. I'll talk to you soon. And there you have it, folks. Another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.